at length, a half-dozen priests swept in from the sacristy, and two processions of young school-girls entered from either side.  They have the skull of John the Baptist in this cathedral.  I did not see it, although I suppose I could have done so for a franc to the beadle:  but I saw a very good stone imitation of it; and his image and story fill the church.  It is something to have seen the place that contains his skull.

The country becomes more interesting as one gets into Belgium.  Windmills are frequent:  in and near Lille are some six hundred of them; and they are a great help to a landscape that wants fine trees.  At Courtrai, we looked into Notre Dame, a thirteenth century cathedral, which has a Vandyke ("The Raising of the Cross"), and the chapel of the Counts of Flanders, where workmen were uncovering some frescoes that were whitewashed over in the war-times.  The town hall has two fine old chimney-pieces carved in wood, with quaint figures, —­work that one must go to the Netherlands to see.  Toward evening we came into the ancient town of Bruges.  The country all day has been mostly flat, but thoroughly cultivated.  Windmills appear to do all the labor of the people,—­raising the water, grinding the grain, sawing the lumber; and they everywhere lift their long arms up to the sky.  Things look more and more what we call “foreign.”  Harvest is going on, of hay and grain; and men and women work together in the fields.  The gentle sex has its rights here.  We saw several women acting as switch-tenders.  Perhaps the use of the switch comes natural to them.  Justice, however, is still in the hands of the men.  We saw a Dutch court in session in a little room in the town hall at Courtrai.  The justice wore a little red cap, and sat informally behind a cheap table.  I noticed that the witnesses were treated with unusual consideration, being allowed to sit down at the table opposite the little justice, who interrogated them in a loud voice.  At the stations to-day we see more friars in coarse, woolen dresses, and sandals, and the peasants with wooden sabots.

As the sun goes to the horizon, we have an effect sometimes produced by the best Dutch artists,—­a wonderful transparent light, in which the landscape looks like a picture, with its church-spires of stone, its windmills, its slender trees, and red-roofed houses.  It is a good light and a good hour in which to enter Bruges, that city of the past.  Once the city was greater than Antwerp; and up the Rege came the commerce of the East, merchants from the Levant, traders in jewels and silks.  Now the tall houses wait for tenants, and the streets have a deserted air.  After nightfall, as we walked in the middle of the roughly paved streets, meeting few people, and hearing only the echoing clatter of the wooden sabots of the few who were abroad, the old spirit of the place came over us.  We sat on a bench in the market-place, a treeless square, hemmed in by quaint, gabled houses,